Alecos Levidis. Painting 1961-2026. A lifelong game
Retrospective of painter Alecos Levidis with over five hundred works: color compositions, drawings, book covers, notebooks, murals, installations and stage sets.
Més a Atenes
The visit starts in 1961, with drawings Alecos Levidis made at 17. Many are political, made in years of dictatorship and war, and he kept them in a drawer for decades: they have been shown only once before, in 2006. The wall texts are in his first person, so the painter talks you round his retrospective.
It runs to more than 500 works. You walk through a double gateway, part of a house mural the Benaki's conservators removed and rebuilt here, into the landscapes and still lifes of the 1980s and 90s. Further on are portraits, painted book covers, artist's notebooks in vitrines, and a ground-floor room of stage sets centred on his 1992 Antigone. If your shelves hold Kedros or Estia paperbacks, look at the covers before you go.
The catch is size: six decades, laid out by the artist himself. Tickets are €9 (€7 reduced), online or at the door. Pireos 138 is closed Monday to Wednesday and stays open until 22:00 on Fridays and Saturdays.
No et perdis
The mural gateway
Look for the double gateway: a section of a house mural, taken off the wall by the Benaki's conservators and rebuilt here, that you walk through into the 1980s and 90s rooms.
The drawer drawings
The first section is drawings from the 1960s and 70s, many of them political, which Levidis kept in a drawer and showed only once, in 2006.
The room of thirteen portraits
A small enclosed room holds thirteen portraits from very different decades; three were painted in the last three years and are on public view for the first time.
Thirty small squares
In their own marked-off space, over thirty small square paintings, the Iconographies (1990) and Painting Essays (2018), the seedbed of his later myth-historic pictures.
The book covers
Painted cover mock-ups for Kedros, Estia, Alexandreia, Maspero and the Athens Megaron, gathered together after years, each treated by Levidis as a painting in its own right.
Ideal per a
- Visites al vespre
- En solitari
- Friquis
També a Benaki Museum Pireos 138
Ara a prop
A prop
Crèdits de les imatges
6
- Vlasis Frissiras – Double Portrait: The Collector, the PainterCourtesy of Hellenic Cosmos Cultural Centre (Foundation of the Hellenic World)
- Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten GenerationCourtesy of DESTE Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art (Athens)
- Eugenia Vereli, Cycladic Café Art ProjectPhoto: Yannis Kouskoutis, © Museum of Cycladic Art
- Benaki Museum Pireos 138Courtesy of Benaki Museum Pireos 138
- Herakleidon MuseumGeorge E. Koronaios / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Benaki Museum of Islamic ArtGeorge E. Koronaios / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0